The Acts of the Democracies

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1983

Coup in Guatemala

A military coup occurs in Guatemala.

According to Witness for Peace, nearly 400 indigenous people, most of them women and children, have been murdered
in the area of the Chixoy Dam in a series of massacres since 1980. The people had opposed the resettlement
necessary to make way for the dam.

The dam project is financed by the World Bank, which states in a memo that it did not know that the residents of
the resettlement community of Rio Negro had been massacred prior to approval of a second loan for the
Chixoy Dam. The memo does not address the question of why the World Bank
continues lending to a government it knows is carrying out a "scorched earth" policy.